Tuesday, Jul 13, 2004
Some might question his lack of political experience, but as he gears up to compete for Iraq's presidency in January, Saad Janabi insists no one is placed to reconstruct the country better than a construction magnate.
Vice-president of one of Iraq's premier conglomerates, the Janabi Group, Mr Janabi lists his role-models as the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and the architect of Lebanon's post civil-war rebirth, Rafiq Hariri.
"We need a business person in politics to rebuild Iraq like the Italian and Lebanese premiers. Stability and security are linked to the economy. We need to have business people in politics," he says.
The idea is not so far-fetched. The current president, Ghazi al-Yawar amassed a fortune in Saudi telecommunications before turning to politics last year.
But Mr Janabi believes in private-public partnership, praising Mr Hariri's construction company, Solidere, for rebuilding postwar Beirut.
In an effort to follow in such footsteps, Mr Janabi has invested in a political party, an 850-strong private security company and the al-Rashid television station to promote his ambitions.
Over the past five months he has taken possession of two ruined Baghdad riverside pleasure domes formerly belonging to President Saddam Hussein's sons Qusay and Uday.
He has dotingly converted them into what Mr Janabi says will be the region's most lavish recording studios. Qusay's palace, devastated by US bombs and Iraqi looters, again sports Italian marble staircases, gold-leaf pillars and a manicured lawn to be used for filming aerobics videos. The transformation cost $7.5m (Eurom, GBP4m).
Among Mr Janabi's other postwar investments are the luminous green Freedom sculpture that replaced Saddam's statue toppled in the centre of Baghdad, and two stables full of vintage Rolls-Royces. His preferred means of travel, however, is speedboat, which avoids Baghdad's gridlocked traffic. The Tigris is dotted with his well-guarded jetties.
He amassed his own wealth in the 1990s under his patron, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, from whom he acquired a near monopoly on cigarette distribution under United Nations sanctions. Mr Janabi earned the sobriquet of Iraq's "cigarette king". But when Qusay Hussein sought a share of the profits, he fled along with Mr Kamil to Jordan in 1995.
"Qusay was responsible for briefly putting me in jail. I was making too much money and he found it a threat," he says, gratified to be the current occupier of Qusay's palace.
"It was like Chicago in the 1930s," says the magnate, with a hint of relish for an era before political correctness. "I no longer deal in cigarettes."
Mr Janabi typifies the confident durability of Iraq's Sunni Arab elite, which floats to the top regardless of the regime.
Under the pre-1958 monarchy, the Janabi family business partnered Iraqi Jews; under the former ruling Ba'ath party it found patrons from Saddam Hussein's clan from the town of Tikrit; and under the new order it employs ex-CIA operatives - according to coalition officials - along with several Iraqi politicians.
His star waned while the Pentagon tightened its control over postwar Iraq under US administrator Paul Bremer. But Mr Janabi says his fortunes have revived since the handover of sovereignty to Iraq's interim government, and his uncle, Adnan Janabi, was appointed a cabinet minister without portfolio last month.
Despite four assassination attempts since the war, the jolly Mr Janabi defies the dangers that keep other Baghdadis indoors.
Equipped with a Jordanian passport provided by King Hussein to get to the US, he mingled before the war with Iraqi dissidents assembled in Washington, married the Republican mayor of a small midwestern town and founded the Iraqi Republican party - although not in deference, he says, to his political backers.
He travelled north from Kuwait to Iraq with Jay Gardner, the first US administrator of Iraq, spending 12 hours a day as his confidant in the early days of the occupation. His Tigris Security Company was chosen as the prime Iraqi contractor for Kroll, the US security company that protects the State Department's aid arm, USAID.
The US-led administration, which for a time had powers to redistribute state property, granted him rent-free occupancy of the two riverside palaces, he says.
Sometimes he has had to cut corners. The Iraqi Media and Communications Commission showed the Financial Times documents they say are forgeries on CPA-headed notepaper. They alleged alleged Mr Janabi used these to release of the disbanded Information Ministry's archive and studio equipment from police custody. Reels of old tape and television monitors lay in the palace courtyard, but Mr Janabi said they would be returned, being obsolete in the digital age.
As befits a man campaigning in the opposition, Mr Janabi has mounted his bid for the presidency on a populist platform, criticising the interim government for being appointed by its US masters: "We believe in people being elected not appointed" he says.
Nicolas Pelham
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2004. Privacy policy.
